Spring, somewhere, is springing, and the birds, as birds will, are singing. Which change of season also sees - aside from the sprouting of daffodils (and of the sudden rainstorms that destroy them) - the publishing world getting ready for its biggest annual home dingdong, the London Book Fair. This, where the industry of books gets down to business, is the place for authors to meet publishers, publishers to meet distributors, distributors to meet retailers and retailers to meet...

Traditionally, with industry events of this kind, this is where the line ends. The last link in the chain of literary production - the customers for whom the books are written - is by and large absent. We're talking about a trade fair, after all, where seminars on marketing techniques and print-on-demand publishing models vie with underhand agent swapshops and backroom advance negotiations. Normally, were you to turn up expecting to find something resembling an enormous bookstall, you'd come away feeling somewhat dazed.

This year's fair, however, while still very much an industry event, reveals a tent pitched more and more toward the pleasures of passing punters. The main attraction in this respect will be the new Literary Café, organised by English PEN. Far away from the Powerpoint presentations and money talk, the café will host talks by authors, including Tony Parsons, Blake Morrison and Kate Mosse (as well, one hopes, as serving coffee and tea).

The café will also be the informal forum for the fair's well-timed focus on literature from the Arab World, currently woefully under-represented in the Western world's bookstores. Egyptian journalist and novelist Khaled Al Khamissi, and the Palestian poet and writer Mourid Barghouti will both be giving readings and talks in the cafe.

However, the main sphere of activity for promoting literature from the Arab world - defined for the purposes of the British Council-sponsored project as referring to the twenty countries and two states that form the Arab League and have Arabic as their registered official language - will be a series of seminars designed to show industry insiders why and how to bring the recent flourishing of Arabic letters to a wider Western readership. In conjunction with the programme, Foyles bookshop will be hosting an Arab Authors evening on April 14 (18.30-21.00).

On each of the three days of the fair, one author will be singled out as "author of the day". Kicking off with Sebastian Faulks, who will be discussing his latest novel Engleby with the Independent's Christina Patterson before signing copies of the book, the following two days will feature the novelist and journalist Alaa Al Aswany discussing literature without frontiers, and the creator of Horrid Henry, Francesca Simon, discussing the sibling rivalry at the heart both of her children's books and her own childhood.

There are also plenty of useful sounding masterclass sessions offering advice for would-be authors and writers, including a masterclass on getting your first book published (with Joanna Trollope and Adele Parks), advice on self-publishing and sessions on pitching ideas for TV and film.

Those willing to penetrate further into the intellectual heart of the three-day extravaganza, will find seminars on a huge variety of subjects. Hot topics that tick my boxes include a session reviewing the publishing industry's environmental impact, a seminar comparing attitudes to the digitisation of books, and a lecture by the chairman of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, Jukka Leides, asking about the relevance of copyright laws to publishing in the digital future.

Given that the digital future is already here, the organisers have also attempted to the make the buzz of the book fair audible to those who can't make it to London. Interviews with the three "authors of the day" will be made available as video podcasts, as well as podcasts relating to main themes.

As a purposeful prelude to the fair, International PEN have organised a world literature festival to run in and around London's South Bank Centre over the previous weekend (April 11 - 13) leading up to the fair. Entitled Free the Word!, the series of panel discussions, talks and debates at the South Bank include Salman Rushdie talking to Lisa Appignanesi, Booker judges Azar Nafisi and Alberto Manguel discussing the "Rights of the Reader" with Daniel Pennac, and a lively panel centring around transcultural identity and the writing of the young French/Algerian writer Faïza Guène.